Sunday, April 23, 2017

There be the tulips! - April 19 Lisse to Wuppertal

Anyone with a memory better than that of a goldfish will recall that our original purpose when we set out on this particular part of our adventure was to see tulips. Most will know that tulips are synonymous with the Netherlands and having got that far, inarguably the best place in the world to see them is at Keukenhof, one of the world’s largest flower gardens and as it happens in a surprising turn of events given our propensity to be there "the day after", with its seven million bulbs at the peak of their full bloom about now.

Keukenhof is located in exactly the opposite direction we needed to travel to get home of course, but it was a great opportunity to introduce Louie to the wonders of nature or perhaps man’s attempts to tame it, and to give him a taste of what it feels like to be outdoors all day in single digit temperature. After taking several thousand arty photos of stunning tulips grown in even more stunning ways, in forests, in houses in patterns of ever increasing ingenuity and spectacle, and unable to choose just one, we suddenly became grateful for his presence. The baby photo wins every time! So there’s one more item ticked off our our list of flowery things to see before we die, and what a glorious bunch of flowery things they were.

At severe risk of suffering some sort of colour shock, we had barely finished our “hellos” to Marty and Vanessa when we snuck off quite early in the afternoon to continue on our circuitous route home, this time heading to Germany and Wuppertal.

1 comment

What a wonderful photograph. I am insanely jealous. I toured the Netherlands in springtime two years ago and the country was enduring the coldest spring in 150 years. It was freezing several days. In the entire country there was not a single tulip in bloom until I got to Keukenhof and saw tulips in the greenhouses.

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